The Whites: A Novel

by Richard Price

  They eyed the long scrape on the SUV’s body and then Billy’s sedan, slant-parked in the wrong direction.

  “Everything OK up there?” Pavlicek asked.

  “Yeah,” Gurwitz said, taking the question as an all-clear sign. “I believe the moving van should be coming somewheres around midmorning.”

  “Everything OK down here?” the youngest of the three asked, looking directly at Billy.

  “Absolutely.” Pavlicek pulled out a wad of cash as thick as a rolled washcloth and distributed what looked like a few hundred dollars to each of them. “I’ll be in touch.”

  The men walked off as a group, each in turn casting an eye back toward Billy and the cars, until they all piled into a minivan in front of an elementary school at the far end of the block.

  “Some of my tenants on the fifth floor were confusing their apartment with a dopeteria,” Pavlicek said, stooping to pick up his side mirror, then tossing it into the backseat. “You’d think everyone around here would know the score by now.”

  The van slow-rolled past them on its way to wherever, the three cops inside throwing deep shade Billy’s way one last time.

  “Do they know?”

  “Know what.” Then: “What do you know?”

  “Just . . .” Billy felt his adrenaline abandon him in a reverse rush. “Where is he.”

  Pavlicek took a breath, tracked the last of the moon as it slipped between two dead walk-ups at the end of the street.

  “You know, when I heard Bannion bought it at the train station that night? I wept with happiness. To go to Thomas Rivera’s parents and bring them news like that: Somebody sliced up your boy’s murderer, he died in his own blood on a filthy subway platform . . .”

  “Did you tell them you killed him?”

  “I didn’t kill him.”

  “Right, that’s right, you were sleeping at the hospital that night. I saw your name on the sign-in.”

  Pavlicek threw Billy a look that had him taking a step back.

  “I didn’t kill him, and that’s a fact. But justice, real justice, Billy, it’s like the getting of grace. The closest thing to peace on earth.”

  “Where is he.”

  Pavlicek crossed the narrow street to 1522, then waited at the entrance until Billy understood to follow.

  Cuffed hand and foot like a bagged deer, Curtis Taft lay curled on his side in the smaller bedroom of a ground-floor vacant, his eyes widening then narrowing at a rapid tic-like pace, the tape across his mouth tugging redly at the trapped curls of his beard. A second strip, half the size of the gag, was pasted across his forehead.

  “Jesus!” Billy hissed, backing up until he hit a wall.

  At the sound of Billy’s voice, Taft’s eyes slowed and then focused on a section of baseboard inches from his face.

  Billy knew he should leave and call it in, but he didn’t. He knew he should cut Taft loose, but he didn’t do that either.

  Taft twisted his head so he could look at Billy directly, the oh-shit sight of his five-year hunter making his chest begin to rise and fall—but not so intensely that anyone could describe it exactly as heaving—and despite everything Billy found himself nakedly wanting some kind of more—a tape-muffled plea, a widening eye, a stream of uncontrolled piss—and he found it enraging that his White wasn’t giving it to him.

  “Cut him loose,” he said faintly.

  Pavlicek dropped into a squat alongside Taft, peeled the smaller strip of tape off his forehead, and held it between his fingers.

  “I heard that the only family member who showed up for Shakira Barker’s arraignment last week was her grandmother,” Pavlicek said, his eyes never leaving Taft’s face. “The same for the funeral of the kid she killed. No one but Grandma. Thank God for the grannies, huh?”

  “Get him up.”

  Pavlicek removed the tape from between his fingers and placed it across Taft’s nostrils, Billy’s already gagged White immediately beginning to writhe, his eyes bulging like eggs.

  Billy finally started across the room, but Pavlicek removed the tape before he could get there.

  “It’s not my place,” he said, extending the strip to Billy on a fingertip.

  Billy returned to his spot on the wall.

  “It’s nothing,” Pavlicek said, still offering the tape. “It’s like applying a band-aid.”

  “Get him up, John,” Billy said, looking away.

  “Peace on earth,” Pavlicek said, rising to his feet, crossing to Billy, and pressing the tape into his bruised chest on his way out of the room. “Nothing like it in the world.”

  A moment later the apartment door slammed shut, Pavlicek leaving Billy and Taft staring at each other from opposite corners of the empty room.

  Helplessly trussed though he was, Taft sensed that Billy wasn’t going to take the bait. His eyes began to recede back into their sockets, then droop with supreme contempt, the same contempt that had allowed him to kill those girls and then go back to bed, the same contempt he’d displayed whenever Billy’s efforts to bring him to justice invariably came to nothing.

  Billy plucked the strip of tape from his chest, stepped forward, and then, as Pavlicek had, hunkered down above his prisoner.

  Taft began to look bored, his eyes dimming in his head. Billy affixed the tape to his nostrils. Taft’s expression remained the same.

  Like he had Billy’s number. Had it since day one.

  Billy got up and left the room to explore the rest of the apartment, the smell of the freshly painted walls reminding him of the day he had moved into his first home with his first wife.

  When he returned to the bedroom, he saw that Taft no longer looked so bored, and that a pinkish mist had begun to seep into the whites of his eyes. Billy left again, this time to splash cold water over his face in the kitchen, wiping away the excess on the sleeves of his jacket, then drying his hands on the back of his slacks.

  When he settled over Taft this time, the pink of his eyes had turned poppy and completely flooded the scleras. A few seconds after that, his hog-tied body began to repeatedly jackknife, then arch in pure animal spasm.

  Billy stood up and returned to his original position against the far wall. “If you even think of flagging down a patrol car,” he said evenly, “or walking into a police station? Or picking up a phone and calling 911?”

  The room abruptly blossomed with the stench of involuntary evacuation.

  “You see how easy he found you? You see how easy that was?”

  Standing next to the Lexus, they watched in silence as Curtis Taft, mustering as much dignity as possible given the circumstances, walked toward the intersection of Vyse and East 172nd Street, his stride a little off-kilter.

  He was smart enough not to look back.

  “I didn’t really expect you to go through with it,” Pavlicek said after Taft finally turned the corner. “But you got a taste of how it would feel, right?”

  Billy didn’t answer.

  “Oh yes you did.”

  Billy started walking to his car.

  “Looking at me like you did when I came to your house . . .” Pavlicek called out after him, sounding both imperious and resentful. “Fucking saint that you are.”

  Billy came back. “This shit is what heals your grief, John?”

  Turning away, he noticed, for the first time, the Westchester Community College decal on Pavlicek’s rear window. “This is how you honor your son?”

  He had no idea how he came to be lying on his back. His jaw felt as if it was now located behind his left ear. When he managed to find his feet, he was immediately thrown belly-down onto the hood of the Lexus, his kidneys being pounded from behind. By the time he rallied enough to defend himself, twisting his hips and whipping a high and ineffective elbow to the side of Pavlicek’s head, the deep one-note whoop of a patrol car brought it all to an end.

  “Go ahead, tell them what’s the what,” Pavlicek wheezed. “Now’s your chance. Go on.”

  Billy, gasping himself, intercepted th
e young cops, both Asian, as soon as they stepped out onto the street. Holding out his gold shield, he slurred, “Family feud, it’s under control.”

  After the uniforms reluctantly rolled off, Billy tottered back to his sedan and drove away, Pavlicek watching him go with the scowling concentration of someone trying to memorize a license plate.

  Coming home directly from the Bronx, his exploded jaw pulsing like a drum, Billy saw the red carnage on his front porch and flew into the house to check on his family, racing bedroom to bedroom, the animal priority of who he loved most coming in the order of rooms entered—Carmen before his kids, his kids before his father.

  All sleeping, all breathing.

  Back in the kitchen, Billy chugged down a glass of tap water, then stepped outside to verify what he thought he’d seen.

  The front of the house looked like a slaughter pit, the cedar planks on the south side of the porch, the exterior wall directly behind it, and Carmen’s pink-and-blue Easter banner all peppered with blossoms of gore. A split trash bag, its guts still puddled with paint, lay between the front legs of his father’s rocking chair, looking, to anyone driving by, like a sleeping dog. But it was the scatter of children’s clothes that froze his heart: a top, a pair of jeans, another top, another pair of pants, and a slurry of underpants and socks, all so red-drenched and twisted that he had no idea whether they were for a boy or a girl.

  He went into the garage, gathered up two lawn bags, a wire-whisk brush, an aerosol bottle of Strip-All, and a joint-compound bucket filled with hot water. Checking the time—six-fifteen—he quickly set to work.

  It was only later, while carefully going through the paint-stiffened clothes, looking for shop labels or laundry marks and finding nothing more than the ubiquitous Gap Kids tag, that it came to him that his family’s tormentor had chosen red twice now, the porch and the children’s clothes bathed in the same arterial shade as the handprint on the back of Carlos’s jacket.

  It made him think about the Jews in Egypt smearing their doors with lamb’s blood to fend off the Angel of Death—except in this case, the message seemed to be the opposite.

  After dutifully driving his kids to school—Carmen before his kids—Billy sat in the kitchen on a straight-backed chair watching his wife wrap her thumbs in heavy layers of gauze, which she then secured with surgical tape.

  He had told her that his dislocated jaw had come from a roll-around with a five a.m. Dusthead in the course of making an arrest, but doubted that she believed him.

  “Tilt your head back and open your mouth as wide as you can.”

  “This is going to hurt, right?”

  “Like a bitch, but only for a second.”

  When she put her thumbs in his mouth, each one settling on a back molar, and then rose up on her toes in order to put her whole body into it, he thought he would puke.

  “Billy, relax.”

  “I am.”

  “No you’re not. I tell you what . . .” she said, lowering herself, then quickly rising up again and bringing her thumbs down so hard on his back teeth that he screamed.

  “Fucking hurts, right?” Carmen said a moment later as she unspooled the tooth-shredded gauze from around her thumbs. He thought he had bitten them off.

  “Guy wasn’t even that big,” he said, the red-hot throbbing of the last few hours miraculously down to a run-of-the-mill soreness.

  “No, huh?” Avoiding his eyes.

  He didn’t understand why she wasn’t pressing him for the truth, which made him even more edgy than he already was.

  “I must’ve had three inches and forty pounds on him,” Billy doubling down on the story. “They should have called animal control.”

  “We had a guy brought in last week?” she said, staying in the game. “He was so cranked on PCP he shattered both of his femurs just by tensing his legs. We go to lift him off his gurney, he jumps up and starts running down the hall like a track star. Didn’t feel a thing.”

  Billy bent over and started to retch.

  Carmen offered him an unwashed cereal bowl from the sink.

  “I’m good,” he said, accepting it.

  “So where are you at?” she asked.

  “With what.” Billy blinked, hoping to duck the subject.

  Choosing to let it be, at least for now, Carmen handed him three Advils and a glass of water.

  “I want you to go over to Saint Joseph’s for an X-ray.”

  “Right now I need to sleep,” he said. Then, gingerly probing his jaw: “Thank you.”

  While Carmen was upstairs changing into her work whites, Redman called.

  “I need to come by,” he said.

  “What for?” As if he couldn’t guess.

  “I need to talk to you. I’ll drive up.”

  “Hang on,” Billy said, putting the receiver to his chest. He’d had enough of visitors, announced and unannounced, coming to sit or stand in his kitchen and dump all kinds of dark drama on his head.

  “I tell you what,” raising a hand to Carmen as she walked out of the house, “I need to take care of something, then I’ll come down to you, how’s that sound.”

  “All right,” Redman said reluctantly. “Just, until you get here? Don’t do anything.”

  Billy walked out the front door a few minutes later, intending to take the paint-stiffened clothes over to the Yonkers precinct that was overseeing the directed patrols. At first he was startled to see Carmen still on the porch, then not, given her missing banner.

  “I saw that when I came in,” he said as offhandedly as he could. “Some kids must’ve taken it last night.”

  But rather than raise hell about it, she seemed distracted, barely acknowledging that he had said anything at all. Then he saw what she was focused on: a rivulet of red paint that he’d missed earlier had settled into the seam between house and porch, looking like a boundary line on a map.

  She walked to her car, unlocked the driver’s door, then spoke to him without looking his way. “I don’t want Millie picking up the kids from school this afternoon,” she said numbly. “You do it.”

  The night-vision surveillance footage from the previous evening, both chalky and luminous, was eerie enough to pass for paranormal activity. Billy watched the tape three times, the mysteriously launched garbage bag sailing as clumsily as an overweight turkey through the fuzzy air before erupting on his porch and spewing out its contents.

  “Those patrols are bullshit. I want a twenty-four-hour posting in front of the house,” Billy said, regretting the “I want” as soon as it came out of his mouth.

  “Not happening.” The detective, Evan Lefkowitz, shrugged.

  “What do you mean, not happening.”

  “We’re undermanned as it is.”

  Billy reached into the bag of clothes lying on an unoccupied desk, pulled out the pair of girls’ corduroy pants, and held it in his fist.

  “Let me tell you what that guy did. He sat on his ass until he saw your doughnut eaters roll by, knew he had a good fifty-five minutes, ate a sandwich, did the crossword, bloodied up my porch, took a piss, washed his car, and went home. I want, I need, my family needs, a twenty-four-hour fixed post.”

  “Doughnut eaters?”

  Billy took a breath. “Look, I’m sorry about that, I swear to you I’m not one of those NYPD assholes who thinks every cop outside the five boroughs is some eeba-geeba related by blood to Barney Fife.”

  Without excusing himself, Lefkowitz stepped off to talk to another detective about a different issue, Billy taking it to mean that maybe his Mayberry riff had been a little too lovingly delivered.

  “Hey, this is my town too,” he said when Lefkowitz returned. “I’m living my life here, raising my kids here, paying my taxes, and all I’m asking you for is just a little bit more protection.”

  “Like I said, we’re undermanned as it is.”

  “All due respect, but could I speak to your boss?”

  “She’ll just tell you the same.”

  “Nonetheless
. . .”

  “Fine by me,” Lefkowitz said, walking away. “She’ll be in next week.”

  As Billy came up on Brown’s Family Funeral Home that night, Redman, wearing a full-body apron and latex gloves, was standing in the narrow doorway swapping cash for Chinese takeout with a delivery boy.

  “You mean to tell me you’re OK walking the streets like that?” Redman said without raising his eyes from the exchange.

  “Like what?”

  “Don’t you have a mirror at home?” Redman counted out his change. “Come in here.”

  Once they were inside the chapel, Redman had Billy take off his shirt and lie down on a somewhat clean gurney. Then, reaching into his cluttered cosmetics cart, he found a jar of Standard Caucasian camouflage cream and went to work on the constellation of bruises that, between Pavlicek and Carmen, had erupted across Billy’s face since the morning.

  “You ever notice how the storefronts line up in this neighborhood?” Redman said. “Dunkin’ Donuts, Popeyes, Roy Rogers, Ashley Stewart’s big women shop, then a funeral parlor, all cheek to cheek like a de-evolution cartoon.”

  “They have fat people in Nebraska too, last I heard,” Billy said, wondering when they were going to get to Pavlicek.

  “My point being,” Redman stepping back to assess his work, then peeling off his gloves, “I had two bodies coming in this week, a five-hundred-pounder and a four, but when I added the weight of the casket I realized that my front steps would collapse, so I had to farm them out to Carolina Home up the block because the director over there was smart enough to put in reinforced steel.”

  Rafer came rolling into the room, made two quick circuits around his father, then charged at an old man sporting a Masonic fez and apron, who was lying in his casket parked by the piano.

  “So.” Billy sat up and reached for his shirt. “Why am I here.”

  Redman took a limping stroll around the chapel, straightened out a few folding chairs, then slowly came back.

  “Look, I’m going to save you a lot of trouble.”

  “How’s that,” Billy said, feeling the cadaver cream starting to grip.

  “It’s done.”

  “What is.”

  “All what you’ve been looking into.”